Through 1983, the WWF had run several episodes of an on-set interview segment called Rogers’ Corner. In front of a plain beige backdrop, the silver-haired sixty-two-year-old former champion Buddy Rogers played the babyface interviewer, staring down heels like “Magnificent” Don Muraco and Captain Lou Albano while bolstering the profiles of fellow faces like Snuka and Rocky Johnson. Rogers was the original “Nature Boy” and was a masterful manipulator of crowds in his prime, but he mostly let his guests speak, supporting their angles with mock offense or fraternal affection.
The idea of a wrestling talk show seemed right. The genius of Vince McMahon Jr.’s WWF was its ability to lampoon popular culture with a straight face and a thick neck. Johnny Carson was still a television staple after the kids went to bed while Late Night with David Letterman had just ramped up confrontational comedy in that television time slot. Roddy saw Buddy Rogers’ Corner and had nodded off to his share of late-night television on the road. He made his pitch to McMahon Jr. If the kids were wondering what Mom and Dad were watching in bed every night, “Piper’s Pit” would be exactly what the kids hoped was on TV. Pure trouble, setting up angles for upcoming feuds in the biggest, noisiest cartoon of them all.
“It’s certainly a pleasure for me, and it’s certainly a pleasure for you,” Roddy began an early segment, during which he interviewed wrestler Eddie Gilbert, who was returning from a supposedly broken neck. Roddy corrected himself when Gilbert took issue with him calling Gilbert’s father, also his manager, “stupid,” and allowed that the senior Gilbert was only “ignorant.” Roddy’s arrogance set the tone of the show, which he accidentally called “Piper’s Corner” during the inaugural segment, confusing names with its predecessor. But the segment immediately distinguished itself from anything that had gone before. The difference was, of course, Roddy. This time, the unrepentant heel was in control, and things were always guaranteed to go horribly, wonderfully wrong.
Jobber Frankie Williams was foisted on Roddy as another early guest. Roddy opened with a little revisionist history:
“I have never actually lost a match, because I figured once you were defeated one time that it would take that oomph away from you that you needed.” Looking at the older, smaller Williams, with his unremarkable blue singlet and underdeveloped physique, Roddy no doubt saw his own worst fears looking nervously back at him. Of course Roddy had lost matches before, but a lie wasn’t really a lie if it was doing a job for the camera. The way he mocked Williams revealed much about Roddy’s ambitions and anxieties—and his strategy for remaining in control of his value as a top-drawing wrestler.
Roddy continued: “You’re just the opposite. I have never seen you win a match in my whole career of watching you….You lack the guts, you lack the authority to go in there. You lack the guts, and when you’re against the ropes what you do is, instead of going after a man, you just back off from him. Maybe a little cowardism, maybe you should be making pizzas…” Williams kept grabbing the microphone, trying to defend himself. Roddy assured him, “This is verbal, this is not physical,” then hit him with the microphone and threw him off the set. He then leaned into the camera, which picked up his closing line: “Just when they think they got the answers, I change the questions.”
The line (which he’d also used in Portland) was a mission statement. Roddy Piper had arrived in New York, and as hard as his bosses might work him, they would be the ones trying to keep up with him. He was going to be relentless in his pursuit of novelty. If he succeeded, contract or no contract, the WWF wouldn’t be able to imagine itself without him. And clobbering a career jobber, a poorly paid punching bag hired only to make other wrestlers look good, drew a clear line between Roddy and the kind of wrestler he wanted never to become.
He interviewed a wrestler of a very different stature in another early “Piper’s Pit.”
“I’m not that well acquainted with ya,” he began his conversation with Andre the Giant. That wasn’t true either. They’d wrestled dozens of times by 1984 and Andre was very fond of him. Years before, in Los Angeles, he’d taken Roddy out for breakfast and made him eat steak and a dozen eggs to pack on weight.
The segment immediately became confrontational, and Andre picked Roddy up by the shirt and threw him off the set. Roddy stormed back, shirtless, but the Giant was gone. Roddy screamed into the camera another of his signature lines, one he’d also employed in Portland: “You do not throw rocks at a man who’s got a machine gun!”
Any threat against Andre was bound to sound hollow, but the riled-up conviction in Roddy’s voice sold it. And that was exactly why Andre liked working with him. Andre either liked his peers or really didn’t, and he’d immediately recognized in Roddy a wrestler who could use his relentless, manic style to convincingly punish the seven-foot-four Frenchman in the ring, all the while drawing enough heat himself to rile up the crowd in Andre’s favour. Andre hated taking a bump for a wrestler who could never appear legitimately to hurt him. With Roddy, that was never a problem.
—
A few weeks later in Madison Square Garden, Roddy and David Schultz fought a tag match against Andre and Jimmy Snuka. That night, Andre did Roddy a great favour.
“Here was the thing with Andre the Giant,” Roddy began, stating the obvious, “he was a giant! When he hit somebody, of course they’d fly, and it would make Andre look great. There was nowhere to go. It was just another short night. No one could get the Giant in trouble. You don’t stand a chance.”
After so many matches together, they’d worked out a few favourite routines. “What he loved to do was, he’d come and he’d take the T-shirt off me, because I had a different T-shirt on each and every week, and he’d put it on himself, like Baby Huey.” Often, after Andre tossed him out of the ring, Roddy would abandon the match and walk off the arena floor toward the dressing rooms. Security would block the way, and with a disdainful wave in their direction, he’d return to the ring.
“So it comes to Madison Square Garden,” continued Roddy. “Everybody, including Vince, tried to say no.” Andre was proposing a unique turn of events in the match and refused to be denied by the WWF brain trust. Roddy had worked hard with him for several years and he wanted to return the favour.
“I’d get in there and I’d get my elbows up to his hair, and when he hit me, I’d hang on to his head and I’d go right in his eyes. And so he’d start to hold his eyes and he’d hit me, but I held on and I’d hit him again, and then the eyes,” said Roddy, explaining how he’d learned to work with a man more than twice his size. “The first time doing this was really difficult. The second time, easy peasy. Finally he sat down in the second turnbuckle, trying to see. “I don’t care if you’re a giant or a polar bear, if you can’t see”—and you’ve got somebody pounding on you and you can’t get up—“it’s uncomfortable. And then when he wanted to, when it came time, he’d explode. It’s how he kicked me every time.”
That night in the Garden, Andre didn’t explode. In the epicentre of the American wrestling universe, the biggest wrestler in history decided he’d put his little friend over. Roddy said, “Andre the Giant allowed me to get on him, split him open, have him down to the point where he had to be taken out of Madison Square Garden on a fucking stretcher, bleeding.” The stretcher was a farce, of course, because the people holding it couldn’t conceivably carry Andre’s dead weight.
“When you look at the tape, it couldn’t really be said he was carried on a stretcher. They had him on the stretcher until they got out of the ring.” Andre fell off on the way to the dressing rooms. “And you know what? He did that for me,” said Roddy. “That’s old code.” Andre returned to the ring five minutes later, wrapped up and ready to chase Roddy and Schultz out of the building, but the favour was done.
“Nice, huh? I don’t think he’s ever done that for anybody else.”
Roddy had a ringside interview with WWF host “Mean Gene” Okerlund a short time later. He was there with Orndorff and Schultz, whom he was still ostensibly
managing. The promo was for an upcoming six-man tag match. Orndorff and Schultz used up all the time, leaving Okerlund to apologize to Roddy for not getting to him. Roddy replied, “Giant Killers don’t have time anyway.”
—
“Piper’s Pit” worked. It became a staple of those studio taping days in Poughkeepsie, New York—and also Brantford, Ontario—when Roddy and the others taped three weeks’ worth of television, including three “Piper’s Pit” segments in a day. One of those segments is still remembered more than any other.
Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka could bring fans out of their seats with his acrobatic high spots and his strong-but-silent persona. He’d wrestled Roddy in the territories as far back as 1978 and had already been part of some iconic WWF matches in pursuit of the heavyweight championship. One cage match famously ended in a Bob Backlund victory followed by Snuka dragging the champion back into the ring, where Snuka climbed the cage and jumped off the top bars, about fifteen feet up, hammering the champion into the mat. Snuka’s daring aerial drops inspired a generation of wrestlers to follow suit, but his second appearance on “Piper’s Pit” would help inspire a cult following of the segment’s host.
After setting up the interview by mentioning Snuka’s previous “Piper’s Pit” visit, during which Roddy hadn’t let his soft-spoken guest get a word in, Roddy handed him the microphone and pulled out a paper grocery bag filled with pineapples and bananas for the Fiji-born Snuka.
“I wanna make you feel at home,” Roddy said. He taunted Snuka with the tropical fruit, and then produced several coconuts and apologized for not bringing in a palm tree so Snuka could climb it.
“Are you making fun of me?” asked Snuka. He held the microphone so far from his mouth as to seem dumbstruck, like a child who doesn’t have the nerve to stick up for himself.
“Am I making fun of you? Oh, no sir. No sir,” said Roddy.
On television, the segment ran with a brief introduction by Vince McMahon Jr., who leaned over a supposed news desk with an air of grave concern to convey that he was the head of the WWF and he was taking responsibility for what viewers were about to see.
“We would like to caution you about viewing this piece,” he said. “It is not a pretty sight at all….Be forewarned.”
As he said “No sir,” Roddy turned slightly away from Snuka, pivoted and cracked a coconut against Snuka’s head. It exploded and Snuka reeled backward, collapsing against the set wall, taking it all down with him. The backstage of the television facility looked as spare as an empty warehouse. The audience looked on in astonishment, as if they couldn’t believe their luck. They had picked this of all days to get wrestling tickets.
For decades people have debated whether that coconut was real and whether Snuka knew Roddy was going to hit him with it. The coconut was real. Watch closely, though, and the segment reveals a few of its secrets. The first thing Roddy does is grab Snuka’s hair with his left hand. That head is going to be in position whether Snuka knows enough to put it there or not.
Roddy brings the coconut around in his right hand, very quickly. Seeing him do this so deftly at thirty makes it easy to imagine him in his teens ambushing the man who’d flashed his billfold at a bar in Winnipeg. Roddy strikes so quickly and unexpectedly it’s difficult for the eye to follow. As he’d learned from bottling himself: hit hard and don’t let up.
The coconut connects with Snuka’s head, but not directly against his skull. Snuka always wore a headband to control his frizzy long hair and the one he has on in the interview appears to be made of hard shells or some sort of white bead-like pieces woven together into a band strong enough that it doesn’t break when the coconut is smashed against it.
Roddy spends the next minute kicking Snuka while he’s down, mashing bananas into his mouth, whatever he can do to add insult to injury. Then, as Snuka rallies and slowly comes to his feet, Roddy, goading him the whole time, backs steadily closer to a steel door and finally slips through and slams it shut on a charging Snuka’s face.
That escape was like Roddy’s escape from most places in those days. It took some planning.
—
Television and film producer Mitch Ackerman had watched Roddy on television in Los Angeles and on MSG Network out of New York, where he’d grown up. Ackerman had already enjoyed great success with shows like Knots Landing, Dallas and Falcon Crest, and he thought wrestling’s increasing popularity was making it prime for some sort of screen treatment. He and Roddy had a friend in common, so with no particular agenda Ackerman arranged to meet Roddy one evening at the Olympic in Los Angeles, while Roddy was on the road.
Ackerman got a quick education in life as wrestling’s most hated heel.
“We set up for me to meet him after the matches by the locker room,” recalls Ackerman. “He was the last match. This was when he was a bad guy and his program at that point was Jimmy Snuka. He was really beating the crap outta him….Usually you see a back-and-forth in a match but this one…there wasn’t any back-and-forth.”
Roddy emerged from the dressing room and asked, “So where’s your car parked?”
Ackerman had parked where the wrestlers parked, thinking that made sense, since he was collecting Roddy after the show.
“Okay, well, look,” Roddy said to him, “when we get out we just make a beeline straight to your car, get in and just take off.” Sure enough, when they left the Olympic, several dozen fans were waiting outside. They didn’t want autographs. Roddy and Ackerman raced to the brand new Jaguar and the fans followed, booing and throwing garbage. Unfortunately, Ackerman had parked facing the building. He had to back out before he could take off, and that was impossible. The mob of fans surrounded them and started banging on the windows and climbing all over Ackerman’s new car.
“Look, I’m gonna get out and I’ll go back into the arena,” said Roddy. “When you’re able to get out of here, pull up to the door.” Roddy opened the car door hard against the press of people on his side. As they went tumbling onto the pavement, he bolted into the Olympic. Ackerman waited until most of the crowd dispersed, then backed out and drove up to the door.
“I honked the horn and he jumped in. I put the pedal to the metal. I just took off. It was scary, and it wasn’t the last time that something like that happened.”
Fame—or infamy—was making life dangerous in New York, too. Greg Valentine had come to the WWF, and one night he was giving Roddy a lift home from Madison Square Garden.
“We couldn’t get out,” said Roddy, referring to the parking exit from under the Garden. “People were rocking the car. So Gregory just puts the hammer down, slips over the curb, gets on the sidewalk on the other side….I don’t know how we didn’t hit somebody.”
“Just kept going like nothing ever happened,” said Valentine. “I couldn’t believe I did it either, without hitting somebody—or going down into the subway entrance.”
“We have angels watching us, Gregory,” he said.
—
“Cowboy” Bob Orton Jr., or “Ace,” as Roddy had started calling him, joined “Piper’s Pit” as Roddy’s “bodyguard.” Orton became a fixture in his cowboy hat and frilled vest, always manoeuvring himself to stand threateningly behind Roddy’s guest.
“‘Piper’s Pit’ woulda been nothing without Ace,” said Roddy. “Ace was there for a coupla reasons. One is because he’s one tough boy. Two, I don’t know anybody that can outperform Bob Orton in that ring in any kinda way. We…complemented each other.”
Having met in Charlotte, Roddy and Orton were now getting along famously in New York, even before Orton’s run on “Piper’s Pit.” Both lived in Woodbridge and Orton was giving him a ride home after a long day of shooting in Poughkeepsie. Somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike after midnight, they realized they were hungry and decided to hang a left for Japanese food.
“Bobby’s driving. I’m just shotgun. We find a sushi place right in downtown Manhattan. We’re so happy.” After an hour of eating and drinking, they stroll contented
ly outside into the cold, ready to go home. But they’re greeted by an unexpected sight. Orton’s car is double-parked, and there are police all around it. They’ve got a couple of men in handcuffs. Roddy’s Halliburton, a kind of briefcase wrestlers coveted, was still where he’d left it in the back seat. But there was glass in the back seat, too, and the engine was running.
It was late and they’d had a few beers. They took a moment to catch on.
“We got up to the car,” said Orton. “I must have left the car with the key in the ignition with the car running. I thought, ‘Well shit, it was cold! I musta wanted to leave the heater on.’ Then the cops wanted to know if we wanted the guys arrested.”
It clicked. Two men had broken into the car, hotwired it and been caught by police when they tried to drive it away.
“I don’t blame them,” joked Orton. “I’da tried it too. Just to get out of the cold.”
Orton and Roddy refused to press charges. It was late, and they didn’t need the hassle. The swarm of police looked on in amazement as the arresting officers let the thieves go.
“These hundred-and-forty-seven New York policemen around the car,” said Roddy, “are you shitting me?! We got in the car and went home.”
—
Throughout 1984, Roddy was involved in another feud that exposed McMahon’s colourful stable to even more fans. Pop star Cyndi Lauper was one of the biggest names in music, thanks to her album She’s So Unusual and its Billboard chart–topping singles. With her multi-hued hair and New York accent, she fit right in with the wrestlers. She became friends with Captain Lou Albano, who appeared in the video for “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” In his fifties then, Albano was known to WWF audiences as a manager, and his relationship with Lauper was the lynchpin of what became known as the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Connection.
Lauper appeared on “Piper’s Pit” in a segment during which Roddy mostly behaved himself. Albano, however, began arguing on camera that he was responsible for Lauper’s success. She balked and the two had a falling out. To settle their differences, she challenged Albano to select a woman wrestler to meet the female wrestler of her choosing. The Brawl to End It All featured a main event in which Albano’s pick, WWF women’s champion the Fabulous Moolah, lost her belt—which she’d held for twenty-eight years—to Lauper’s pick, Wendi Richter.
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